Can any WoW refugees explain the exodus to XIV to me?

[KaivaC]

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm happy we're getting an influx of players here from another MMO. More players is always a good thing, especially now that a new expansion is just over the horizon. But for someone who has played WoW for all of two hours and then quit, I'm curious what is causing the exodus. Some of the terms I've seen thrown here and there are pretty unfamiliar to me. I know this expansion, BfA has a lot to do with it - but that's about all that I really understand.

Would somebody mind explaining it? And if this helps to serve as a PSA to our own devs about pitfalls to avoid, all the better.

[Taebok]

I left WoW after Legion dropped (2016) having played since classic, so I'm not a BfA refugee and can speak only for myself.
In short, it's no longer the game I fell in love with.

My biggest complaints.
Too much RNG wrapped in RNG wrapped in more RNG.
A complete inability (or desire) to balance classes in any way. (While constantly adding more)
Crafting has become completely irrelevant.
Putting better mounts and pets in the store than were available in game.
The community has been beyond toxic for years, they do nothing.

I'm sure other people have other reasons because WoW has, frankly, turned into a dumpster fire.

In short, they put greed before game play and it's no longer fun.
I knew once Activision took over it would be all down hill and probably stayed a couple xpacs longer than I should have.

This fellow here wrote a letter that I think explains it pretty well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comment...entertainment/

But if you don't feel like reading it all, here's the most important part of what he wrote.

"You stopped making an MMORPG years ago. Instead, you turned WoW into an elaborate fantasy-themed casino replicator. It's a third-person looter-shooter designed to string players out like addicts looking for a fix. Your other titles are just animated shopping carts that feature mini-games people can play in between opening loot boxes."

[Super_Bee_Brian]

I quit WoW as soon as I learned there's no player housing. I was playing ESO before WoW and got spoiled with it's great housing system. Plus, the art style is INCREDIBLY CARTOONY. It was like playing SpongeBob Square-pants Online.

Edit: Also, it felt "generic". Nothing about WoW is quirky. It's the ultimate "standard" MMO.

[KaivaC]

Well posted response

Holy hell that reddit thread has a lot of upvotes. And at 91% currently - jeez. But I'm willing to bet this is reflective on a huge portion of WoW's playerbase. Thank you for that, and thank you for the explanation. I'd always been curious, but since I don't play WoW, some of the wording others had used was foreign to me. Let us hope that Yoshi P and/or his dev team have their eyes on this and can keep Square from forcing the mistakes that Activision is currently pushing on WoW.

I quit WoW as soon as I learned there's no player housing. I was playing ESO before WoW and got spoiled with it's great housing system. Plus, the art style is INCREDIBLY CARTOONY. It was like playing SpongeBob Square-pants Online.

Edit: Also, it felt "generic". Nothing about WoW is quirky. It's the ultimate "standard" MMO.

Yet I'd dare say that WoW is still king due to subscriber base and revenue that it still brings in. Still...I was looking for more of an answer on why we'd been getting such a huge exodus of players from there. Post above yours looks like it covered it pretty well. I'd never played it much, but I imagine that WoW modernized a lot of MMO concepts that are still prevalent today. Can't speak on how some of the players look because I'd imagine that catered to a lot of players, tho.

[Edax]

I left WoW way back in Cataclysm, so I'm not really a "refugee", but my beef with WoW were the LONG, LONG content dry spells where the devs wouldn't even update the WoW website for half a year. There wasn't much to do but run dungeons and raids, but my guild rarely succeeded in raids because the difficulty is much higher in WoW and when all my gear was rendered obsolete with a new gear cycle, I decided to leave since there wasn't much of a reason for me to stay anymore. There wasn't any player housing, there really wasn't a point to crafting in the endgame, and PVP was unbalanced between the Horde and the Alliance, making it somewhat depressing. Also, they tied the main story into the raids so that since I wasn't part of a successful raiding guild, I missed out in the main story. So all in all, there were huge problems with the end game because there was oh so little to occupy your time with. It also didn't help that you were limited to a few crafting or gathering jobs. Nothing to grind in the end game except gear, which often looked awful and would obsolete very fast. They didn't even have the glamor system back then so it was all extra pointless to get an awesome "epic". It made investment in my player character really difficult, especially since I had to use "alts" to experience other classes or gather mats that my main couldn't get. In fact, the player character in WoW doesn't even have a character in the writing, the PC doesn't get to be in the cutscenes. The Warrior of Light stoically nodding in a cutscene beats WoW somehow in that character department.

At the very least FFXIV has player housing and a dynamic crafting system that drives a player driven economy, so even when I'm not in the mood to level up a job, I can still put myself to use. WoW didn't have that, the crafting system was backwards, with the raw materials being so much more valuable than the final product. If you wanted gold, you mined mats, and if someone had mined the mats before you (like a bot), you'd get nothing and completely waste your time. In many ways, OS Runescape turned out to be a MMORPG for me because there was always so much to do. In WoW, content ran dry and it got so incredibly DULL. My Shirogane Mansion is my main anchor into FFXIV, it offers me something I can't have anywhere else. Redecorating can keep me invested even during FFXIV's dry spells, so that problem at least has been partially mitigated.

[MaethusXion]

Not a "WoW Refugee", bu I heard people have been leaving because Blzizard killed off a LOT of player favorite NPCs...

[Alestorm]

Much like Taebok I left during mid-Legion, leveled a bunch of alts and even (possibly) got a world first with a Demon Hunter with the Warglaives of Azzinoth. (1 week after the class was made available) I left largely because it got boring having nothing to do since I never raided and PVP was trashed. Artifact grinding felt pointless, content felt super empty of any real meaning and things being locked behind Suramar reputation forced my hand. I tried this on a 2 week trial... and been here on this little Miqo'te ever since.

[Arkdra]

Not a "WoW Refugee", bu I heard people have been leaving because Blzizard killed off a LOT of player favorite characters...

The story is bad but it's not particularly worse than it has been in the past. Still it has certinly irked some people.

I quit after MoP but I still keep up with WoW out of morbid curiosity. The stuff I usually see most often cited as being aggravating:

1. Characters got massively powered down. In Legion, everyone had their artifacts which gave people a whole bunch of power. In BfA, those artifacts get depeleted relatively early on. The thing is, they weren't just about stats. There were cool traits and even spec defining abilities tied to these artifact weapons as well. So when people had to give them up, they lost a bunch of utility.

2. Which combines nicely with a stat squish that had the end result of you cruising into early bfa doing big ae pulls while soloing, and then 4 levels later you would struggle with 1 monster and god help you if a 2nd showed up (spec dependent).

3. The replacement system for this, azerite gear, just isn't adequate. It's grindy, and it added more RNG to the gearing process, and the traits are all fairly dull unlike the cooler ones of the artifact weapons.

4. They also crippled low level exp gain, although this has since been fixed somewhat. But up until 8.1 there was a ton of people complaining about levelling alts being mega tedious now.

5. Which was a bad move considering the big box movers of the expansion were the new allied races. Except the big new races that people were most excited for (Kul tirans and zandalari trolls) still aren't in the game and are also locked behind a really long rep grind.

6. The other big features, island adventures and warfronts, both went over like a lead balloon. They weren't terrible, but they didn't generate much positive buzz to nullify any of the above.

7. Unpopular combat changes. They made the gcd longer and also took a bunch of stuff off the gcd and made it on gcd. I think they may have recanted on this a bit. The current mythic+ modifiers are widely considered to be worse than in Legion and the rewards you get for completion aren't great minus one weekly chest.

8. No real incentive to play the game. By which I mean that unlike in FF14 where you probably get some kind of currency for doing something that will have value, in WoW you just... don't. You pretty much want to get your weekly mythic chest, semi-weekly warfront chest, and then your serious raid drops. Nothing else will drop upgrades for you unless you are a relatively fresh 120, and that includes their casual lfr raids. Only other thing worth doing are emissary world quests, which refresh every couple of days and sometimes aren't worth doing even then.

[Marxam]

I left WoW after Legion dropped (2016) having played since classic, so I'm not a BfA refugee and can speak only for myself.
In short, it's no longer the game I fell in love with.

My biggest complaints.
Too much RNG wrapped in RNG wrapped in more RNG.
Putting better mounts and pets in the store than were available in game.

SE is starting to head towards this path so you are definitely in for a treat especially if you want certain "emotes" or "gear" from a certain "content". As a player since 2.0 and even the beta before it, here are the things I've noticed:

-Patch cycles moved from 3 months to 4 months.
-Mogstation no longer consumer friendly; examples include fantasia no longer account wide, emotes increasing in price and locked to one character and expensive mounts with generic music to name a few.
-Content droughts more frequent due to longer cycle patches and content being stretched out.

The latter is hit or miss because on the one hand it's good to stretch out content like raids so people can focus on the MSQ but on the other hand the relic is no longer an alternative to raids and tome weapons and has been relocated to a strictly glamour function. The other two I have the biggest issues since its clearly cash-grabs and I refuse to believe that 5+ years into this MMO that the FFXIV team is still struggling to fill positions to create content. Just a classic case of cash-cow economics where SE puts just enough investment in where their profit is at its max.

However this game is far from bad and the music, story and flashy battles are what keep me coming back even after I unsub. The music especially, like I can't be the only one who first entered o12 and thought of Final Destination from Smash. I never played WoW but I hope the FFXIV sees what happened to them and tries to steer clear of it and to the WoW refugees, if you can inform Yoshi P and the FFXIV dev team of your reasons for coming here maybe you can help FFXIV from ending up in the same place.

[MaethusXion]

snip

Ment NPCs, specified in my post now.

Also played during MoP, but quit when XIV came back. Was a WoW-DPS and went back like "lol how do I play this again?"